Henson described the segment in the original pitch reel for The Jim Henson Hour (using clips from the Inner Tube pilot for visuals) calling Lead-Free TV "The Muppet Show from the future," full of special effects, rock music, fast-paced comedy and human guest stars.

“Jim was hoping to salvage the remains of Inner Tube and reshape them into something called Lead-Free TV. The concept was still relatively the same—a cast of new Muppets and a guest star interacting across television channels—but for Jim, it was still more about playing with the new technology.[1]”

Henson believed the Lead-Free TV concept was an ideal format for satirizing cable television. However, like with the Inner Tube pilot, the writing remained a problem. Henson rejected a script called Pirate TV in 1988 for being too "nasty."[2]

To help tie the segments together, Henson insisted on a central theme for each episodes. Henson thought the segments should be somewhat educational; he proposed skits in which the characters explained the federal debt, the ozone, or the legislative process.[3]

As development of The Jim Henson Hour progressed, the series continued to evolve—becoming the MuppeTelevision segments. The series changed from a one-hour piece that would air every fourth week into a 20-minute segment that would anchor the first-half of each episode of The Jim Henson Hour. Additionally, NBC worried about the appeal of the show. While Lead-Free TV was originally envisioned with a cast of all-new Muppet characters, as the development continued many well-established Muppet characters—most notably Kermit the Frog as a central host—were added to the cast to make the segment more appealing and marketable to audiences.